I apologize in advance for a long post. It's more of a rant than anything else, but i did add a poll to see what you guys thing of this.
Well, I bought my ASUS A8N SLI DeLuxe in february. That's like 8 months ago.
I had about 7 different BIOSes on it ranging from 1002 to 1015 I have now. Pretty much the same goes for NForce drivers.
I tried to enable NAM several times in the past always gettng BSODs in nvtcp.sys (firewall driver) for any ridiculous reason you can think of. Mostly the culprits were eMule and FireFox.
Now, a few days ago I decided it was time again to update all my drivers and BIOS to try and enable the thing again. I applied the 1015 bios over 1013 I had previously. That went fairly smooth. I only had problems overclocking back to my previous values (3000+ Winchester from 1.8 to 2.4). Had to do it incrementally, wouldn't go back in one shot.
Followed by a successful new install of latest nforce and gfx drivers, available from NVidia site. After checking the install and BIOS by running memtest 86, prime, super pi and some other benchmarks, I installed the NAM too.
Well, that's where the problems begin. After installing NAM, I can't freely switch my cable connection between NV and Marvell adapter any more. It simply won't complete the DHCP request any more. I have to reboot each and every time I try to do that.
Additionally, Outlook seems to behave strangely on NV firewall. NV firewall will say that KEM.exe (Logitech mouse + kbd driver) attempts to access the net, not outlook.exe. But that seems to be the least of my problems. While port 25 (SMTP) works fine, port 110 (POP3) seems to work only for a few minutes after reboot. So I can't check for new mail unless i reboot. WTF??????
Oh, forgot to mention: all ports are open for outbound connections in firewall. Why on earth does firewall even have these settings when it's applications I have to enable, not ports for any communication to take place? Besides, they are not respected no matter what I do.
Also the cable connection seems to loose the IP assigned by the DHCP server after an hour or so of being online.
Otherwise the stuff seems to be doing just fine. Takes stupendous amounts of RAM due to apache, numerous drivers and services and who knows what else. Why, oh why did they have to implement it like this. It seems to me it would be simple to write a simple .exe which would accomplish the same result through CLI and only take RAM when ran instead of running multiple stupid and unnecessary services.
Now, I always perceived SW firewalls to be CPU intensive. I can't really tell you about CPU usage of NAM since I can't seem to get the darn thing to work correctly, but I checked CPU usage while running eMule with Windows firewall (that was what I used before) and it was close to 0 while ZoneAlarm was really high.
So, after all these problems with NAM, can anyone tell me why I should use it instead of "crappy" windows firewall, which seems to do a good job of keeping my comp uninfected?
Jure
Well, I bought my ASUS A8N SLI DeLuxe in february. That's like 8 months ago.
I had about 7 different BIOSes on it ranging from 1002 to 1015 I have now. Pretty much the same goes for NForce drivers.
I tried to enable NAM several times in the past always gettng BSODs in nvtcp.sys (firewall driver) for any ridiculous reason you can think of. Mostly the culprits were eMule and FireFox.
Now, a few days ago I decided it was time again to update all my drivers and BIOS to try and enable the thing again. I applied the 1015 bios over 1013 I had previously. That went fairly smooth. I only had problems overclocking back to my previous values (3000+ Winchester from 1.8 to 2.4). Had to do it incrementally, wouldn't go back in one shot.
Followed by a successful new install of latest nforce and gfx drivers, available from NVidia site. After checking the install and BIOS by running memtest 86, prime, super pi and some other benchmarks, I installed the NAM too.
Well, that's where the problems begin. After installing NAM, I can't freely switch my cable connection between NV and Marvell adapter any more. It simply won't complete the DHCP request any more. I have to reboot each and every time I try to do that.
Additionally, Outlook seems to behave strangely on NV firewall. NV firewall will say that KEM.exe (Logitech mouse + kbd driver) attempts to access the net, not outlook.exe. But that seems to be the least of my problems. While port 25 (SMTP) works fine, port 110 (POP3) seems to work only for a few minutes after reboot. So I can't check for new mail unless i reboot. WTF??????
Oh, forgot to mention: all ports are open for outbound connections in firewall. Why on earth does firewall even have these settings when it's applications I have to enable, not ports for any communication to take place? Besides, they are not respected no matter what I do.
Also the cable connection seems to loose the IP assigned by the DHCP server after an hour or so of being online.
Otherwise the stuff seems to be doing just fine. Takes stupendous amounts of RAM due to apache, numerous drivers and services and who knows what else. Why, oh why did they have to implement it like this. It seems to me it would be simple to write a simple .exe which would accomplish the same result through CLI and only take RAM when ran instead of running multiple stupid and unnecessary services.
Now, I always perceived SW firewalls to be CPU intensive. I can't really tell you about CPU usage of NAM since I can't seem to get the darn thing to work correctly, but I checked CPU usage while running eMule with Windows firewall (that was what I used before) and it was close to 0 while ZoneAlarm was really high.
So, after all these problems with NAM, can anyone tell me why I should use it instead of "crappy" windows firewall, which seems to do a good job of keeping my comp uninfected?
Jure
